Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

382 страница из 418

“Work of barbaric art, a basket, I

From painted Britain came; but the Roman city

Now calls the painted Briton’s art their own.”

The smaller description of boats, other than galleys, employed by the Romans for transporting their troops and supplies, were the kiulæ, called by the Saxons ceol or ciol, which name has come down to us in the form of keel, and is still applied to a description of barge used in the north of England. Thus

“Weel may the keel row,”

says the song, and on the “coaly Tyne,” a small barge carrying twenty-one tons four hundredweight is said to carry a “keel” of coals. The Romans must also have possessed large transport vessels, for within seventy or eighty years after they had gained a secure footing in this country, they received a reinforcement of 5,000 men in seventeen ships, or about 300 men, besides stores, to each vessel.

Bede places the final departure of the Romans from Britain in A.D. 409, or just before the siege of Rome by Attila. Our ancestors were now rather worse off than before, for they were left a prey to the Vikings—those bold, hardy, unscrupulous Scandinavian seamen of the north, who began to make piratical visits for the sake of plunder to the coasts of Scotland and England. They found their way to the Mediterranean, and were known and feared in every port from Iceland to Constantinople. Their galleys were propelled mainly by means of oars, but they had also small square sails to get help from a stern wind, and as they often sailed straight across the stormy northern seas, it is probable that they had made considerable progress in the rigging and handling of their ships. A plank-built boat was discovered a few years since in Denmark, which the antiquaries assign to the fifth century. It is a row-boat, measuring seventy-seven feet from stem to stern, and proportionately broad in the middle. The construction shows that there was an abundance of material and skilled labour. It is alike at bow and stern, and the thirty rowlocks are reversible, so as to permit the boat to be navigated with either end forward. The vessel is built of heavy planks overlapping each other from the gunwale to the keel, and cut thick at the point of juncture, so that they may be mortised into the cross-beams and gunwale, instead of being merely nailed. Very similar boats, light, swift, and strong, are still used in the Shetlands and Norway.